Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (22 page)

But one producer, Ray Stark, knew that for the movie to work, it had to feel real, and the best way to start that was to film it in the town where the story actually happened. And so, when Stark suggested making the movie in Natchitoches, Louisiana, among the places that Susan had known and the people who had known her, Harling signed with him.

Harling and his parents, Robert and Margaret, then had the extraordinary experience of watching their lives and the lives of their friends being played out in their hometown by some of the best known actors of their day: ‘I had what was called “casting consultation”, and they were very generous about that and let me hang around for all that.’ He smiles. ‘But when they come to you and say, Sally [Field] wants to play your mother and Shirley [MacLaine] wants to play Ouiser, and Olympia [Dukakis] – she just won the Oscar two or three weeks ago – she’ll be Clairee, well, you’re not going to say no.’

Being a Southern family, they were, understandably, especially excited at the prospect of Dolly Parton playing the beauty parlour owner, Truvy: ‘Dolly was a little more glamorous than the original woman Truvy was based on, but that’s just to be expected,’ says Harling, with Southern sangfroid.

Meg Ryan was originally cast to play Shelby, but she dropped out when she got the lead in
When Harry Met Sally
. The near unknown Julia Roberts was cast in her stead ‘and as soon as I saw that smile I said, “There’s Susan,”’ Harling recalls.

Roberts visited the Harlings frequently, looking through their family albums and hearing stories about Susan from people who knew her in the town. Field, on the other hand, kept more to herself, wanting to create her own character, ‘and my mother, being a Southern belle, would never want to impose. Also, if you’re a woman from a small Southern town and Sally Field is playing you in a movie, you go, OK, you go girl, whatever you do is fine by me.’

Although some things in the film were changed for dramatic effect – whereas Shelby collapses at home with her baby son, Susan in fact fell into a coma in hospital – the movie was remarkably true to the women and their stories, Harling says. His mother did in fact donate her kidney to her daughter, his sister did risk everything to have a baby and the women the characters were based on talked just as they do in the film, in ‘bumper sticker slogans’, as Harling puts it: ‘Your husband is a boil on the butt of humanity’; ‘If you can’t say anything nice, come sit by me.’

‘What I wanted to show was the strength of these women, and the strength they gave each other,’ says Harling, who then went on to write
Soapdish
, also starring Sally Field, in the nineties. ‘I enjoy writing women’s emotional journeys, but it’s hard today to get movies made that aren’t based on comic books. Character-driven films are the domain of the independents which a studio is never going to attack because they’re all corporations. It’s getting harder and harder to [get films made] with human roles, and a part of that is that it’s much harder to get films made with women’s roles.’

‘I don’t think that
Steel Magnolias
would be considered “industry friendly” today,’ says Dukakis with more than a touch of wryness.

Where once studios made women’s movies, now they make ‘the negative sisterhood movie’ to use Wesley Morris’s memorable phrase. This is what the women’s movie has become today and it is a bafflingly popular genre, one that suggests the women hate each other and should be duly punished for their stupidity by having to spend their lives fighting over men and being humiliated onscreen as much as possible. You know these movies: they’re 2009’s
Bride Wars
, 2014’s
The Other Woman
, the toxic glut of overly monikered films like
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
,
He’s Just Not That Into You
,
I Don’t Know How She Does It
, pretty much anything starring Kate Hudson.

One could argue that this genre was kick-started in the eighties, with films like
Working Girl
, in which Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver engage in a wearily predictable catfight over their job, ostensibly, but boring Harrison Ford, in actuality. This is one of the many reasons why
Working Girl
is, to my mind, a far inferior film to that other great eighties movie about women working,
Baby Boom
.
^fn6
The Witches of Eastwick
could also be described as an anti-sisterhood movie, but that film – starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Cher, all obsessed with Jack Nicholson’s penis – ultimately satirised the genre.

Negative sisterhood movies are now the default style for what were once romcoms and women’s movies: movies consisting of women hating each other and competing with one another. What’s strange is that these films are all less successful than the traditional women’s movies such as
Steel Magnolias
ever were. So if you want to know how little Hollywood cares about women today, watch a negative sisterhood movie.

Everyone knows that the representation of women in movies today is bad. Even Faludi, who raged so passionately against the representation of women in eighties movies, had to admit that, in the early nineties, film roles for women had dropped so far that male characters made up two-thirds of people onscreen, and that number hasn’t changed since. When Faludi returned to
Backlash
, she wrote in the new introduction to the 2005 edition: ‘Back in the 80s … were single women breaking courtship rules and taking the sexual initiative? “You’ll turn into a psychokiller and meet your maker in an overflowing bathtub!” the Hollywood mullahs decreed. Ah, the good old days.’ After all, she concluded, ‘There are some things worse than a backlash.’

In 2013 women made up only 21.8 per cent of the crews of the 100 top grossing films in the US, and that number has remained pretty steady for the past twenty years. But people within the industry say it is far from the complete picture and what’s actually changed is what studios will allow them to do. ‘I love directing women but, for so long, it’s just been a non-starter,’ says Paul Feig, the director of female-led hits
Bridesmaids
and
The Heat
. ‘You’d go into meetings and people would say, “Oh, a female lead? Can’t you make her male?” A movie starring a male is normal but a movie starring a woman is a gimmick, and it just didn’t make any sense to me.’

And this is as true of movies aimed at children as at adults. In 2006 Feig signed on to direct the children’s film
Unaccompanied Minors
, about a boy and his little sister causing chaos in an airport.

‘It wasn’t until I got into the rewriting that I learned it was based on a real story that had happened to a girl and her sister. Again you go, “Gosh, they just changed the lead girl to a boy – that’s really aggravating!” It was never entertained that it could have been a girl in the lead. It wasn’t even an issue,’ he recalls with a laugh of frustration. ‘And this whole debate about whether female superheroes can open their own movie – just fucking do it! What is the big debate about it? Why does Wonder Woman have to be part of an ensemble? Why can’t she come out of the gate in her own movie? Why are we so precious about it? To me it’s not even an issue, but that’s why it’s so funny that it’s an issue!’

The common argument in defence of the current low representation of women in movies is that studios aren’t sexist – they’re simply looking after the economics. So while women will see movies starring men and women, men will only see movies starring men –in other words, it’s the audiences who are sexist. This problem is hardly exclusive to the film world. The books website Goodreads recently surveyed 40,000 of its members and found that readers overwhelmingly preferred books written by authors of their own gender: 90 per cent of men’s 50 most read books were by men and 45 of the 50 most read books by women were written by women. Currer Bell, George Sands, George Eliot and Robert Galbraith didn’t need 40,000 people to confirm that readers judge authors by their gender.
^fn7

Yet just as the Goodreads survey found that male and female readers alike both rated women authors more highly than male ones, so audiences – male and female – have repeatedly proven how much they like movies with female protagonists. Recent films featuring female protagonists including
Bridesmaids
,
Frozen
,
The Help
,
Gravity
and
The Heat
have all been enormous successes, while male-led ones like
The Lone Ranger
and
After Earth
have flopped. In fact, the biggest box office disasters of all time all featured male protagonists, including
47 Ronin
(Keanu Reeves),
The 13th Warrior
(Antonio Banderas),
The Lone Ranger
(Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer) and
Heaven’s Gate
(Christopher Walken and Kris Kristofferson). As yet, no one has taken the failure of these movies as proof that men aren’t funny, men can’t carry a movie or that maybe audiences just don’t like to watch men.
^fn8

The fact is, women’s movies – the few that still come out – are generally very profitable. They don’t make as much money as many men’s films, but that’s because action movies (which now invariably star men) are bigger productions with bigger marketing pushes, but also with higher costs. In fact, Silverstein’s blog Women and Hollywood found in 2013 that movies with a female protagonist that year earned 20 per cent more than movies with just a male protagonist, making $116 million compared to male-led ones making $97 million, even though, out of the 100 movies they sampled, only 16 had female protagonists. But as Amanda Hess pointed out: ‘We still don’t know whether gender equality in films would constitute a smart economic choice for Hollywood, because we’ve never gotten anywhere close to testing that assumption.’

And so one woman, who started acting in the eighties, decided to try to rectify that. ‘
Thelma & Louise
[which came out in 1991] was my first experience with the difference between how media respond to something and how it turns out in real life,’ recalls Geena Davis. ‘All of the press was about, “Get ready for many more female buddy pictures and road trip films.” And then … nothing. Same thing happened with [1992’s]
A League of Their Own
: “Proof that women’s sports movies can make huge box office!” Name all of the female sports movies since then, right? This happens every few years, with the press anointing yet another female-starring film as the One That Will Change Everything, but nothing happens.’

Davis made her film debut as a rarely clothed starlet in 1982’s
Tootsie
, sharing a dressing room with a somewhat embarrassed cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman. Her roles throughout that decade were remarkably, even hilariously, varied, including playing an insect’s girlfriend in
The Fly
; a temptress of aliens in
Earth Girls Are Easy
; a rubber-faced ghost in
Beetlejuice
; and a mercurial dog trainer in
The Accidental Tourist
, for which she won an Oscar. She still acts occasionally today – she had a small part in 2013’s
In a World
, about sexism in the movie trailer business – but, like many actresses before her, she found that studios stopped calling once she was over forty:

When I was starting out it was the era of Meryl Streep, Sally Field, Jessica Lange and Glenn Close getting nominated for movies with spectacular female roles in them. I had heard that great parts for women drop off at forty, but I thought, These women will change everything. It won’t be a problem any more when I get there. But it didn’t change. Before forty, I was averaging about one movie a year. During my forties, I only made one movie. That’s a big change. But I look back on that decade when I was coming up and there were so many movies about interesting women:
Frances
,
Places in the Heart
. They were the anomaly then, which is why women were still in the minority then according to the statistics, but those movies were still made.

In 2004, while staying at home with her then toddler daughter, Davis noticed something odd about the movies and TV shows aimed at children: there were notably few female characters, and this ‘absolutely floored’ her: ‘Then something else shocked me: NO one seemed to be seeing what I was seeing: not my friends (until I pointed it out), and not the decision-makers in Hollywood, either. Whenever I brought the subject up, if I happened to be meeting with a studio executive or director, to a person the response was, “Oh no, that’s been fixed.” And they would very often name a movie with one female character in it as proof that gender inequality had been fixed! That’s when I knew I needed the data.’

Davis ended up sponsoring the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in entertainment media, covering over a twenty-year span at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Inspired by this, she then launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2007. The data the research and institute uncovered appalled her: ‘In family-rated films, crowd and group scenes contain only 17 per cent female characters. Seventeen per cent! In animation and live-action. That means the fictitious worlds that are being created for kids have only about a 17 per cent female population. Why, in the twenty-first century, would we be training kids to see women as taking up far less space in the world than men?’ she asks.

Nor is it just the numbers of women who are being represented: it’s how they’re represented, full-stop, says Davis. ‘Female characters in animated G-rated movies [US equivalent of a U], made for the youngest of kids, wear the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as the female characters in R-rated [US equivalent of 18] movies. Astounding, isn’t it? And in research, there are no fuzzy definitions; this is not sexy appearance in a generalised way. It’s specifically revealing clothing. These findings highlight how seemingly innocuous children’s fare can be sending a damaging message to kids: it’s teaching kids to see women and girls as less important than men and boys, and that girls should be judged on their sex appeal,’ she says.